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Rad Community Technical Discussion Boards (Computer Hardware + PC Software) >> Cloning Programs (Except Norton Ghost) >> Migrate a computer to a VMWare vm
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Message started by António Vasconcelos on Oct 25th, 2008 at 7:12am

Title: Migrate a computer to a VMWare vm
Post by António Vasconcelos on Oct 25th, 2008 at 7:12am
Hi,

I'm trying to (somehow) make an image of the C: disk of a win98se computer in order to restore it to a vmware virtual machine.

I have a few limitations that makes this a bit more dificult.

I CAN'T change the source machine in anyway. I can't install software, I can't open the machine in order to add a 2nd hard drive. I don't have a working floppy disk. I can only boot from the IDE CD/DVD and this drive is not a burnner. The machine have usb 2.0 ports and a builtin ethernet (VIA Rhine II)

So, I need something that boots from CD/DVD and can write the disk image to:

  • Network (windows share or ftp server)
  • USB disk
  • USB CD/DVD burner
  • 4 Gb USB pen


And at last, there must be a converter to make the vmware disk image from this image...

Of course that the easy way to do this would be to get the hard disk and connect it to a machine with ghost installed but the owner don't let me do that.

Can someone help ?

Thanks in advance...

Title: Re: Migrate a computer to a VMWare vm
Post by Brian on Oct 25th, 2008 at 3:44pm
António Vasconcelos,

I can answer one of your questions. The one about creating an image of that Win98 partition. Download snapshot.exe, not setup.exe from.. (it's a trial)

http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/down.htm

Copy snapshot.exe to your USB external HD (or pen drive) and connect the external HD (or pen drive) to the Win98 computer. Double click snapshot.exe and create an image of the OS partition to the external HD (or pen drive).


Title: Re: Migrate a computer to a VMWare vm
Post by Alex v Kaam on Oct 26th, 2008 at 4:02am
If the system can boot from usb use the g4l usb stick a few post down, if you have problems using it do an fdisk -l and I am sure can get you through it.   then boot vmware from the usb and restore.

Title: Re: Migrate a computer to a VMWare vm
Post by António Vasconcelos on Oct 27th, 2008 at 5:42am

Alex v Kaam wrote on Oct 26th, 2008 at 4:02am:
If the system can boot from usb use the g4l usb stick a few post down, if you have problems using it do an fdisk -l and I am sure can get you through it.   then boot vmware from the usb and restore.


I was worried about image compatibility, how to convert the resulting image to a vmaware virtual disk. After all, you don't have to, you just have to boot the vm using the same program and restore the image to the virtual disk.
So, in the end, I used clonezilla and wrote the image to a Windows share. Had some trouble with the restore because clonezilla can't restore an image to a smaller disk even if the space used is smaller.
I had an uncompressed image with 1.5 Gb but it wont extract to a 8 Gb virtual disk, my guess is that's because clonezilla do a direct dd of the partition table and restore it with dd too, so, if the disk is smaller the linux in the clonezilla disk starts to act strange and don't let you do the restore.
So, one HAVE to define a virtual disk that is larger than the original disk, then you can do the restore. I think that later I'll be able to resize the partition (on the vm) using partition magic or something similar.
I'm still fighting with w98 in order to stop it crashing when it loads device drivers for the old hardware, but the clone part is done.
Thank you all.

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